Psychological Trigger – Anticipation, Learn How To Sell From Netflix!

Psychological Triggers – Anticipation

In a world where we have all kind of information competing for our attention, is it possible to make your idea or opportunity stick and become “engraved” into your clients mind? occupying more space and time in their head? or to an investor, or a big player in your field?

In short, it is.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend and he presented me with a business opportunity, after talking and explaining what the business idea was and how he wanted to execute the idea, I was waiting for the proposal, but instead, his final words were,

-Well, gotta go, I’ll talk to you later about this!

In my head we never closed the deal, I couldn’t stop thinking about that I wanted a piece of that business and be part of it, and even tho I knew why that was happening I couldn’t help myself because we have no control over anticipation.

Let me ask you a question, how many times you had this experience where you are watching a series and at the end of the show you see the scenes of the next episode that will air next week, and you can’t stop thinking about it,or when you watch a movie trailer that you really liked and you can’t rest until you watch the movie? or even the internal debate of “I need to sleep” but you end up watching another episode on Netflix?

Our brains cannot handle not having the full information, and it results in suffering for anticipation, in fact, it’s something that is with us since we were kids, (waiting for the Christmas presents and not resting until opening it)

This is an area that is vastly studied in Psychology and it’s called the Zeigarnik Effect.

the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

This is a psychological effect that we have no control over, the good news is that we can use that in business.

In marketing, we call it Psychological Trigger of anticipation, when there is something uncompleted or when you anticipate that you will complete something, you are “engraving” that idea in your client’s head.
However, it’s not all uncompleted information that causes this effect, So there is a smart way of applying that in business.

But in black and white, how can you use it?

If you simply go to your clients and say “hey next week at 6 pm I’ll be doing something special”, it may not work, in the psychology study, they found that the more important or the curious the information is the better it works.

That’s why when my friend talked about the opportunity he created an interest and then didn’t completed the information he created that “space” in my head where I literally couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about that idea.

Here at The Black Bird anticipation plays a huge role in our advertising strategies, and to create anticipation you need to think at least 3 steps ahead of your marketing campaign.

For example.

Launching a new product for a client, we would create a series of videos leading to a webinar, each video would be creating anticipation and then we would use the webinar as the sales video to sell the product.

It is extremely important for you to start thinking about how you structure your marketing campaigns and start implementing this psychological strategy to increase your results.